


and then the rain stops.

by ladymacbeth99



Category: Thor (Movies)
Genre: Angst, Bodyswap, Brother Feels, Gen, Post-Thor: The Dark World, really weird hurt/comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-29
Updated: 2015-07-29
Packaged: 2018-04-11 23:25:18
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,444
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4456523
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladymacbeth99/pseuds/ladymacbeth99
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Loki has a very strange way of making amends with his brother.</p>
            </blockquote>





	and then the rain stops.

When Thor awakes, he knows something is wrong.

He’s lying on hard ground and feels a blanket of pine needles beneath him when he stirs, but that doesn’t make sense—hadn’t he fallen asleep on the pull-out couch in Jane’s flat?

All is silent save for the innocuous sounds of chirping birds above him and the gentle trickling of water.

Cautiously, he cracks open his eyes and sees sunlight slanting through a jade canopy of evergreen boughs. He could be anywhere—Vanaheim, Midgard, and Asgard all have forests just like this one. He tries to sit up and find his bearings, perhaps remember how he had gotten here, but every muscle feels like it’s being pricked with white-hot needles when he makes the slightest movement.

_Why am I so sore?_  He wonders.  _What happened last night?_

He recalls stumbling back to Jane’s apartment rather exhausted from a battle alongside the other Avengers.  

The new villain they had confronted hadn’t posed much of a threat—Thor’s only injury had been the shallow gash in his side from the sorceress’s feeble spear—and even that would never have happened if Thor had not been so careless, but he’s been distracted of late. The wound must have already healed itself, for he no longer feels it.

Thor grits his teeth against the pain and pulls himself into a seated position. Judging by the stiffness in his back and the position of the sun almost directly overheard, he has been sleeping here quite a while.

He’s in a small clearing, he realizes, droplets of sunlight speckling the mossy forest floor, and there is a small brook off to his left. He still does not recognize the place, but there is nothing particularly unusual about it—at least, nothing he can put his finger on. Yet it looks vaguely strange to him, as if he’s seeing through a filter that changes all the colors by a shade or two. He rubs his eyes to make certain he is fully awake.

That’s when Thor knows something is definitely, surreally wrong:  _these are not his hands_.

They move at his command, but instead of broad and calloused as they should be, they are pale and spidery and…familiar. He rolls up his black sleeves, revealing long, lean arms quite different from his own. Looking down, Thor recognizes the trousers and tunic trimmed with emerald green, though he would never wear such things himself. He hardly needs further proof to confirm his horrifying suspicion, but even so he runs a hand through his hair to find it is shoulder-length, curly, and dark as obsidian.

Grumbling a string of curses under his breath, Thor drags himself to the stream. The face reflected in the water is not Thor’s, though he knows it as well as his own.

“Loki,  _what have you done?”_  he roars.

Nothing happens, except that he startles some birds in the canopy. There is clearly no one nearby to listen. But a chill runs through Thor, because the voice echoing through the clearing, the voice speaking his words, belongs to his brother.

_What kind of dark sorcery is this? How is this possible? Is this all just some elaborate illusion?_

But if Thor’s consciousness somehow resides now in Loki’s body, then it stands to reason that the reverse could also be true. Is Loki out there somewhere now, impersonating him and gaining Jane’s trust, the Avengers’ trust, using his appearance?

The thought makes him nauseous.

Thor calls out to Heimdall several times, but there is no response. Surely, if Heimdall saw Loki, he would bring him back to Asgard to face justice once more? But, Thor realizes, grinding his teeth in frustration, Loki is capable of hiding himself in plain sight, cloaking himself in magic, and Thor does not know how to reveal himself.

As Thor stalks off into the trees, searching for some sign, some solution, he feels something familiar.

Magic always leaves a kind of trace. It cannot be seen or heard, only sensed, and every sorcerer has a unique magical signature, like fingerprints. Since Thor has studied very little in the theory behind it, he usually cannot distinguish one magic-crafter’s handiwork from another. Except, that is, for one.

He knows the feeling of Loki’s magic—almost like a familiar aroma he remembers from his infancy. It’s a faint residue, an aftertaste, but it is definitely here. And Thor can track it.

He will find his brother, and make him reveal this deception.

* * *

For three days, Thor follows the faint trail of magical residue—retracing Loki’s steps—and it takes him out of the forest and across a broad marshland.

It’s almost amusing, picturing his prim brother wading through the mire, but all the while Thor wonders if he is doing the wise thing. What if this is a false trail, intended to distract him? Surely Loki was being awfully careless leaving any traces at all, so what if this leads Thor to a trap?

Still, unless Thor can figure out how to un-cloak himself from Heimdall’s vision, there is no other alternative. He must simply stay on his guard.

Oddly enough, Loki had not disarmed before switching bodies—the knives are still tucked into their sheaths at his waist and in his boot. Though he knows the basic principles, Thor feels uncomfortable using them because he’s accustomed to brute force, but that’s simply not an option in this scrawny body.

He catches a few rabbits to eat, and thankfully Loki’s trail never wanders too far from fresh water. On the third evening, he comes once again to a shallow creek. Though he feels extremely awkward about it, Thor decides he ought to bathe and scrub the mud off of him from his journey.

Underneath the layers of leather and steel, he is disturbed to find a pattern of scars along Loki’s ribcage, on his legs, his back. Some are still pink and newly-healed. Some appear to be festering with infection.

It takes a rather significant wound to leave a scar on Æsir skin—and since they are such a hardy folk, Thor surmises the same is true for the Jotnar—so he thought he knew every mark on his brother’s body. The scar on his forehead, from a particularly narrow escape during their adventures on Muspelheim. The scar on his mouth, from losing a gamble to unsavory dwarves. Thor knows, because he dressed those wounds himself until Loki could be brought to the healers.

But these hidden marks tell a more recent story.

_What happened to you in that lost year, brother?_  Thor wonders, his stomach churning a little at the sight.

Most of all, his gaze is drawn to the still-raw wound at his sternum. It aches when he touches it, but it seems on the mend. Somehow, Loki had truly been impaled on a blade, and survived. Perhaps his magic had saved him—Frost Giants, after all, are notoriously difficult to kill.

But this thought makes Thor pause. It has not occurred to him until now that he resides in a Jotun body, and that he has never seen his brother’s true face.

Thor cannot wield Loki’s magic because it is a craft that takes years of study to understand, but shapeshifting is an innate ability, a fact of Loki’s biology. It takes only a few moments of concentration before Thor sees the ivory skin staining blue in patches, like ink spreading through water. Soon, the hands in front of him are blue-gray, engraved with angular runes. Even though he is still waist-deep in the cool stream, he suddenly feels uncomfortably warm.

He makes himself look at the reflection. To stare into a pair of luminescent red eyes. The strangest part is that Thor still  _recognizes_  Loki’s face even with this change. He is slightly ashamed of the shudder that runs through him at the sight, but he forces himself to keep looking.

Slowly, he starts to clean out the wounds that have not closed yet, wincing as the cold water stings.

_I will love this face for your sake, Loki. I will try, at least. I will take care of this body if you will not._

* * *

Eventually, Thor’s journey takes him up a steep, wooded mountain. Occasionally, he must climb up a rocky precipice—he is grateful for the nimble hands that can cling to small crevices in the stones, for the impeccable balance and agility Loki’s body affords him, but he flinches every time his skin scrapes against the rock, for he bleeds more easily than Thor.

Sometimes the trail that Thor tracks leads him in meandering circles, and once again he wonders if this is all some elaborate game played at his expense.

As Thor hoists himself up onto a ledge, sweating and cursing, he thinks,  _If I ever find you, Loki, I am going to kill you._ He pauses at the top of the cliff to catch his breath.

“I’ll kill you, little brother,” he grumbles aloud, and he nearly smiles but it’s much too painful. How many times has he said those same words, sometimes in annoyance and frustration, sometimes in playful jest? But everything is different now.

* * *

Thor believes he knows what he’ll find when he reaches the top of the mountain—knows because of the roiling black clouds at the summit, for Loki is clearly as inept at controlling Thor’s storms as Thor is at controlling Loki’s seidr. The magical trail is growing fainter and fainter, but it does not matter anymore because he has a destination now.

In his mind, he practices what he will say when he finally confronts Loki.

_You reverse this spell and return to your cell in Asgard, or I will—_

There is no threat that could carry any weight while he is in this form, he realizes.

_Aren’t you tired of all this mayhem, brother? What are you hoping to accomplish? What have you to gain with this scheme?_

But he had asked much the same question when battling his brother in New York, and he had not gotten through to him then—so why should now be any different?

_This is exhausting, Loki, I cannot keep doing this—grieving for you over and over._

Lightning flickers and the clouds above finally open up. Thor keep climbing, trying to ignore how easily the cold rain chills this thin form, telling himself that he must be nearly there.

* * *

When he finally reaches a clearing near the summit, Thor sees  _himself._

He’s sitting hunched over on the ground, breathing heavily, his gold hair drenched in the rain. It’s disconcerting, seeing himself as others do, rather than as a reversed mirror-image.

Their eyes meet. A flash of lightning illuminates their faces in the gloom.

None of Thor’s rehearsed words matter; in fact, his mind goes utterly blank and he doesn’t remember what he intended to say.

“Loki.” He is not sure if it is a greeting, a warning, a threat, or all three.

“Thor.” The younger brother’s voice is low and trembling; he does not get up to attack or flee.

Then Loki clutches his side and hisses in pain. Without thinking, Thor is kneeling at his side in an instant, wordlessly demanding an explanation. His eyes are far too bright, his face deeply flushed with fever, and he is shaking with chills—no small matter, since Thor’s body is hardly susceptible to illness.

Thor lifts up the scarlet tunic to see what is ailing him, only to find the scratch that Thor had sustained in the battle the night before this madness began. It’s festering and oozing and the skin around it is blackened horribly.

“I don’t understand,” Thor says, breaths coming fast from the panic coursing through him. “That wound was so small.”

“Poisoned blade, you dolt,” says Loki, smirking weakly. It quickly becomes a grimace of pain. “You were careless, Thor. Terribly careless.”

“Have you been…watching me?” Thor wonders. “How else could you know I was in peril?”

Loki appears too exhausted to lie: he is silent.

Thor understands now what his brother means to do—why he traded places with him—but it fills him with horror.

“Loki, you change us back right now,” he demands, shaking him roughly by the shoulder. “ _Undo the spell, do you hear me?_ ”

But Loki only laughs—a bitter laugh that’s disturbingly wrong coming from Thor’s throat.

“I will not,” he whispers, his breathing becoming labored. “This is my last trick, brother. It’s rather a good one, do you not think?”

Angry tears pour down Thor’s face. “You will not die right before my eyes again. Change us back, and we will figure something—”

“There is no cure for this, it’s lyndwyrm venom. Don’t you understand you are dying, Thor?”

They stare helplessly at each other, enraged for different reasons.

“Let me do this for you, brother,” croaks Loki. “As recompense. I’ve been living on borrowed time for too long, but you—you must live—”

He breaks off with a violent cough, and when he faces Thor again his lips are stained with blood. “The All-Father can restore your appearance with a glamor. If he doubts your true identity, you need only lift Mjolnir to prove who you are.”

He looks as if he will try to say more, but Thor hushes him. In this weak and stringy form, Thor feels his embrace is so inadequate, but Loki lies back into his arms and closes his eyes, seeming relieved by his presence. The thunder above has quieted, and rain falls softly and gently around them.

“You led me here,” Thor murmurs; “you wanted to be found.”

“I did not want to die alone.”

Thor presses his lips against his hair. He feels as if his heart will be crushed with the weight of his sorrow. His brother is quite literally giving his life for him— _to_ him—and it’s a strange gift Thor does not know what to do with, but he vows to honor it however he can.

_I am watching myself die_ …

Loki begins to speak again, his words so faint that Thor must lean close to catch them all.

“All my life I wanted to be like you, Thor. That’s irony, is it not?”

But then he seems too overcome with agony to speak, and all Thor can do is murmur soothingly to him and stroke his hair until it is over. Thor is babbling, he hardly knows what he says—apologies, promises, reassurances of love—but he’s taken with the mad idea that if he continues to speak, Loki will hold on a little longer.

And then the rain stops.


End file.
